Sneak peak at Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia

Available at Amazon.com, Spring 2018

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Thirteen years before the RevolutionApprentice physician Jem Connolly sets sail for the New World to escape Patch—an agent for a Dark power that wants to drain Jem’s inherited magic, Second Sight—and to fulfill the prophecy of her mentor in magic, Granny Kestrel, that Jem will find her destiny in America. In London, 14-year-old Jem studied with Ben Franklin; in the Colonies, Jem will stay with his wife, Deborah, and their daughter, Sally. When Jem's ship lands in Philadelphia, she expects to find out right away what she’s supposed to do with her life. Instead, she clashes with a rude frontiersman, doctors the crew aboard a quarantined plague ship, battles a practitioner of voudon, and meets a mystic who takes her on a journey into a world that shimmers beneath our own, a world that connects to Jem’s visions. Jem wants to find her destiny—but where is she supposed to look?

The storm bore down on us all day and struck at night. The Red Queen was six weeks out of London, two weeks from America, and a week from anywhere else. She had sailed this route scores of times. She had weathered gales before.

I had not.

The ship pitched and yawed while I waited in my tiny cabin for the whoosh and tilt and drip to end. There is nothing so great as the ocean and nothing so small upon it as a person aboard a wooden ship.

On deck, sailors thumped and shouted. Ropes creaked. The tempest shoved the ship like a child pushing a toy. I threw out a hand to stop myself crashing into the hull. Just the thickness of a plank away, the sea growled like a living thing hungry for bodies to swallow down into the deep. The growling reminded me of Granny Kestrel’s story about the Dark whipping up a storm to drown her fisherman father and steal his magic.

Granny’s story had seemed fantastic, even though I’d been sent to Granny in Cornwall to learn to control my Second Sight. When I was little, my Sight sent me into the mind of a lion at the Tower of London, and I saw myself standing with Mum through the lion’s eyes. I’d never heard of a human switching places with a beast. I feared I was mad. Eventually, I confessed my fear to my friend, Margery, who sent me to Cornwall because her grandmother, too, was Sioghted. Granny Kestrel taught me that Sight was both gift and curse: it let me hear animals thinking and showed me the future, but it made me a target for people like Patch, who wanted to steal every strand of magic knitted into me.

The ship lurched. I slapped my other hand on the hull. Where did dolphins shelter during a big blow like this? Maybe they saw the storm coming before we did and swam away to calmer waters. Maybe they dove deep to their underwater kingdoms. Pods of dolphins had escorted the Red Queen halfway across the Atlantic, and in that place between waking and sleep, I thought I’d heard them singing the same music I’d dreamed on my journey to Cornwall, music that conjured peace and friendship and invitation. The ship heaved. I hit my head and quickly sat.

I’d gotten over my general seasickness weeks before, but I was glad I’d only nibbled the ship’s biscuits we were issued while the line of black clouds rose on the horizon and the crew battened the hatches. I sat in the dark through the maelstrom, praying for God’s hand on our ship, our captain, our souls. Outside, the wind shrieked blasphemy. The sea growled.

Someone pounded at my door. “Come in!” I shouted, not daring to stand. The latch clicked open to reveal a dripping sailor holding a lantern. “Baines!” I said. “How does she go?”

“She goes walty, Abernathy, but the storm’s got to let up soon. Could ye come up?”

“Topside? Now? What for?”

“Smith’s hurt.” Smith, like most sailors, steered clear of passengers, including me, and he kept his cap pulled down over his ears, probably to avoid having to explain to landlubbers what he was doing. I hadn’t spoken with him once. Baines, on the other hand, had been friendly ever since I’d drawn a picture of him shaking out a sail.

“How did he get hurt?” I asked.

“A davit come loose and hit his head. Laid it open like a peeled spud. Cap’n can’t tend him now.”

Captain Peterson doubled as medical officer—some captains did—but at that moment he was steering the ship between peaks and valleys of water. Could I tend Smith on my own? I’d learned medicine from my guardian, Dr. John Abernathy of London, but I’d never treated a patient by myself.

If Baines had been a dog, he’d have been whining. I couldn’t make Smith’s injury any worse, so I said, “Let me get my case.”

I felt in my valise for the precious medicine case Dr. Abernathy and Margery had put together for me. Margery would have liked to send her entire apothecary shop, but they had selected a few portable essentials and packed them in my trunk along with everything else they thought I might need for a visit to America that hinged on my finding the source of whatever called me across the sea, a vist that might stretch into years.

“Got it,” I said.

Baines lit our way along the passage with a lantern that cast swinging pools of light from one side to the other. We walked with feet spread wide against the roll of the ship. Some of the passengers who shared the larger, open area aft of my tiny cabin huddled just below the hatch to gasp at any fresh air that might leak down from above—or, perhaps, to scramble up the ladder and take their chances on the open sea if the Red Queen began to take on water. In good weather, fluyts like the Red Queen carried twice as many passengers as we did. But anybody who crossed the Atlantic in September and October, the stormiest months, had to be particularly anxious to get to the New World. Each of the fifty or so passengers had space big enough to lie down and stretch his arms to either side. Many had vomited during the storm, but the waste buckets hadn’t been emptied in a day and a half. Some had overturned. The stench made my eyes water.

“They’ve lashed him to the mizzen so the sea don’t take ’im.” Baines stopped at the foot of a ladder, and said, “Watch your feet, Abernathy. ’Tis wild on deck.”

“Can we get him belowdecks?” I said as Baines began to climb.

“Aye, but it’ll be you and me what moves ’im. There’s not a man to spare til we’re out o’ this.”

So I must walk the deck in the gale. Smith would be dead weight. I handed my hat and medical kit to a woman whose arm draped over the ladder like a leech on a leg. “Can you keep these for me, madam? We’re going up to fetch an injured man.” She clutched my things, her green face pinched in the lantern’s flickering light.

Baines latched his lantern to an iron eye bolt on a beam. “So’s you can see to patch him up,” he said. Then he opened the hatch, and a flood of cold seawater poured over the coaming. The woman guarding my medical case snatched it out of the way. Baines and I hauled ourselves out amid a roaring wind such as I’d never heard. I crouched on the deck to let my eyes adjust. A sizzle of lightning granted me a moment of sight, and what I saw set my heart to pounding.

The Red Queen trembled at the bottom of a valley of water with mountainous waves towering over her on all sides. In the next moments, the ship lifted as though in the hand of a sea giant until she perched atop a peak of water looking down on where we’d been dwarfed minutes before. The height allowed all hands to see the faint lightening of the sky aft: dawn, thank Heaven.

A wave of cold water melted off Greenland ice heaved up the hull and spilled over the gunwale. It tugged at my feet like a living thing. I grabbed a line to keep upright and prayed the lurch and tumble wouldn’t throw me to the slick deck. In flashes of lightning, I saw sailors, some without their oilskins, laboring to keep us turned so the waves didn’t hit us broadside. Rain sluiced down their bodies. Baines staggered from handhold to handhold, and I tried to place my hands exactly where he placed his. Staggering behind Baines was like flying in a nightmare: nothing to land on and no joy in being aloft.

By the time we reached Smith, I was soaked and shivering. Baines lashed himself to his injured mate so Smith wouldn’t be washed overboard if we fell. Then we each took one of Smith’s arms, and Baines led the way, handhold by handhold, back the way we’d come. Rain and seawater washed over us in torrents. I was afraid Smith might drown where he stood.

Then I fell. I missed a handhold just as the ship bucked. I lost my grip on Smith. The water tumbled me down the deck, smashed me into the gunwale, and lifted me into the tail of the wave, and I began to go over....